A business process may coordinate actions performed by people and/or devices. To reflect real-world workflows, a business process may contain asynchronous steps that could span a significant period of time (e.g., lasting several months). During that time, artifacts associated with the business process may be subject to change (e.g., via patches or other updates). These changes, however, should not have an impact on the instances of the business process that are already running. Instead, the changes should result in a new, separate process version that is isolated from older process versions.
Note that business processes may be associated with complex entities that assemble various artifacts representing different perspectives, such as control flow, data flow, and/or connectivity. When transforming a process model into an executable runtime representation (e.g., a “build”), a versioning component may automatically associate these different artifacts with content-dependent version identifiers. The corresponding runtime components which handle these artifacts may then process the versioning information and simultaneously handle multiple versions of an artifact.
Some process model artifacts, however, may be managed by legacy runtime components that are part of an established middleware stack. Moreover, some of these artifacts may not be specific to business processes (that is, the artifacts might also be used with other types of application scenarios). Web service endpoints, for example, can be used to expose an Enterprise Java Bean (“EJB”) as well as to receive messages from within business processes. Because other application scenarios might not require versioning support, the corresponding runtime components may not support such a feature. Adding versioning support for these components could impose significant implementation costs (as well as impact compatibility and behavioral aspects for existing consumers).
Accordingly, methods and mechanisms for automatically and efficiently deploy non-versioning business process artifacts may be provided in association with some embodiments described herein.